Bad Seeds
by lorcan
Summary: In which our CBI team must find enough evidence to arrest a serial killer - even if she's only in the first grade. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1

Appropriate disclaimer applies.

* * *

"Children aren't wicked," Rigsby protested, not a surprising stance from the man who genuinely liked people, even though his very job required him to sort out the less pleasant ones.

"Sure they are. Haven't you seen 'The Bad Seed'?" Cho's flat countertenor had two settings; unimpressed, and really unimpressed. His face had a similar range.

"The Bad Seed was a movie," Rigsby returned. Now a campy classic, the black and white film had been so shocking when first written – an angelic eight-year-old lies charmingly, murders several, and _gets away with it_ – that the ending was changed to include the little girl's sudden accidental death, supporting the code that the time that "crime doesn't pay."

Still, the title character's wide-eyed innocence and old-fashioned manners, coupled with occasional flashes of the budding monster within, was just as unsettling today as it was in the fifties. More importantly, debate about whether a child could truly be "born bad" still raged.

"Good fiction almost always has a basis in fact," that would be Van Pelt, their perennial peacemaker, trying to reconcile both viewpoints.

"What about _Star Wars_?" Jane couldn't help stirring the pot a little.

"I have an aunt that looks like Jabba the Hutt," Cho deadpanned. "I talked to her for a few minutes, she's a cold fish. Thought I'd let her wait for a while, see if she gets freaked out in there by herself."

Jane thought for a moment the other man was still talking about his aunt, but realized he was referring to the suspect in their interrogation room: Jeannie Washington, accused of murdering a baby, setting fire to a neighbor's home, and either accidentally or intentionally cooking said neighbor alive inside. She had withstood questioning from several other law enforcement officers before being handed off to the CBI, so far appearing unshaken by either her crimes or their repercussions, and Cho, whose interrogation tactics were nothing like subtle but notoriously effective, didn't often describe someone as tough to crack.

Jeannie was seven years old.

"Can he leave a child in there by herself?" Van Pelt again, slightly concerned for the girl but also wanting to know her boundaries should she need them in future.

Lisbon, sitting on Rigsby's desk and half-listening to the argument while she went over the casefile, considered for a moment before erring on the side of caution.

"Better not to, Cho, go ahead. Jane, I want him on lead," she warned, not for the usual reasons. There was always some slight danger that Jane would hypnotize someone, plus his tendency to release their suspects without warning, but this time she was concerned for other reasons. Sociopaths did exist, though they didn't often see them so young – more debate there, whether sociopathy didn't manifest until later in life, or whether they just didn't get caught until they were older – and they exploited every detail and weaknesses they found in others to their own advantage. If that little girl was a bad seed, and she sensed even the tiniest bit of grief or paternal warmth in Jane, there was no telling what she might do to or with him.

"Come on. Don't talk this time. Really," Cho ordered him, though there was slim chance he'd be obeyed.

In the interrogation room, their chief suspect sat in a folding chair in the center of the table. The room was meant to feel quite cramped with two or more men hunched over that narrow table, but little Jeannie Washington had all the space she could need. She had her hands folded neatly in front of her, feet dangling several inches above the floor, and looked up with interest when the door opened.

To the eyes of the men, the child was neatly and fashionably dressed, in clean, appropriate clothing neither too old nor too young for a girl of seven or eight. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, still with that soft wispy quality from before puberty sets in and turns it to something requiring endless lines of beauty products to maintain. Her shoes had laces, so she was intelligent and adept enough to tie them regularly – what age did children learn that? Cho couldn't quite recall – and she had neither earrings in her ears nor polish on her fingernails. In all, a normal, well-adjusted little girl to any eyes, not obviously disruptive, unnaturally mature, or even suspiciously wholesome.

"May I have a soda?" She asked as both men seated themselves at the table with her.

"No." Cho was not a man much given to explaining himself.

"I'm thirsty."

"You can have some water when we finish."

"Is that allowed?" The question was pointed but the tone sounded more like "I'm going to tell on you" than "I'm going to trap you in a legal technicality."

"It's allowed. I'm a police officer, and I'm going to ask you some questions now. You're going to answer them, everything else is going to wait."

The girl stared at the agent evenly. She wasn't afraid of him, though Cho's stone-faced matter-of-factness and brutal frankness had been known to reduce grown men to pleading blobs. A shame they couldn't let Rigsby in; he was their go-to man for the questioning of women of all ages. They liked his open face, his polite deference and his aw-shucks demeanor, because Rigsby was above all a nice guy, and that very fact meant that they couldn't let him question the little girl if she was truly as manipulative as was claimed. She'd have him at the first request for soda pop.

Jane watched her, fascinated, and Cho clicked open his pen.

"My name is Agent Cho. This is Mister Jane. I'm required by law to tell you that we're recording this conversation. Please state your name and spell it." He didn't lean over the table like he did when questioning adults, but so far the man's style differed little from the norm.

"My name is Jeannie Washington. You spell Washington W-A-S-H-I-N-G-T-O-N. Like the state."

Jane couldn't resist a small smile. Cho couldn't tell if she was making fun of him or not. "Is Jeannie the name on your birth certificate?"

"My real name is Jeanine, but my parents call me Jeannie."

"Thank-you Jeannie. Do you know why you're here?"

This time a sigh, a slight roll of the eyes – cute now, but she'd be a handful when she hit twelve or so, and that attitude hit full force. "That baby got killed and Miz McMahon's house got burned down."

_What an interesting way of saying it. The passive voice, not 'somebody killed the baby' or even 'the baby died' but 'that baby got killed,' an admission that she knew it was a deliberate act, and refusal to assign blame for it to an unknown 'someone.'_ Such unconscious tells were Jane's bread and butter.

"She died in her house when it burned down. Do you understand these are very serious things?"

"My father said they're in a better place now."

Cho leveled a black gaze on her. "That may be so, but do you understand it is a very serious thing when someone is killed?"

A pause, then a childish shrug. "Yes, in church they said you go to Hell for it."

An innocent answer, but she hadn't so much as blinked at saying the word _Hell_, the way most young children did. Religious confidence, or comfortable demon?

"Here on Earth you go to jail for the rest of your life. That would be a long time if you're only seven."

"They don't send little kids to jail."

Cho gave that up, and switched topics. "Tell us about when Michael King got killed. Several people said they saw you with him that afternoon."

"My mom babysits him because his mom has to work. He and my baby brother are the same age, they play together."

Michael King hadn't really been an infant; according to the report he was slightly over a year old, able to walk but not long distances, so when he'd been found, after a day and night of searching, on the opposite side of the neighborhood from his home, appallingly beaten, slightly mutilated, tearstains still visible between the blood smears on his face, it was plain he had not wandered there on his own.

Jeannie was, by all reports, the last person seen with him, playing in her front yard with the victim and her own little brother. According to her mother, she had called them in for a snack and sent them downstairs to play. She had seen all three go down the stairs to the basement playroom, but when Michael's mother arrived to pick him up, only Jeannie and her brother Christopher were there.

In a basement room, only ground-level windows too high for children to reach and no door except the one the mother could see from her spot in the kitchen, no one could figure out where the boy might have gone or how he could have done it. Christopher was too young to talk coherently and Jeannie had said only that "he left." Both mothers were a wreck and the choices seemed to be that a seven year old had done serious harm to a toddler or a mother was slightly less attentive than she claimed, leaving the child an opportunity to climb up the stairs and out the door she had allegedly been watching. Once outside, he had obviously fallen prey to some violent, horrible person eager to do violence to an unattended baby.

Blame fell on Jeannie's mother, but it was still an accident, a tragedy, and would have faded away had two days later, the Washington's next-door neighbor not been burnt to crisp in her bed, in a fire that entirely consumed the building, burned half of the house on its other side, and damaged the adjoining wall of Jeannie's own house. Again Jeannie had been seen, according to another neighbor, "sneaking around," and some bright bulb on the local police force decided evidence was evidence, even if the only suspect they pointed to wasn't even out of the first grade.

And so here they sat, law enforcement agent, mentalist, and little girl, whose only crime so far seemed to be having an unclear notion of the seriousness of violent death – and what first grader did have a clear grasp of the concept of death?

"Alright, tell me about that afternoon when people saw you with Michael," Cho prompted.

"Me and him and Christopher were playing in the yard."

"What were you playing?"

"We were drawing on the driveway with chalk. They don't draw very good pictures but Mom says they're too little to play games like I play with my friends."

"Then what happened?"

"We went inside and had peanut butter crackers. Then we went downstairs to play cause Mom had to make dinner." _Or watch a soap?_ Jane thought cynically.

"How long were the three of you down there?"

"We're still learning time," Jeannie informed him, a little saucily.

"I mean was it just the three of you down there the whole time or did anyone else come down?"

She appeared to think, tapping one smallish hand on the table. Underneath, the legs still dangled. "The doorbell rang but nobody came downstairs."

"Did anyone come in the house?"

A shrug. "I could hear Mom talking to somebody, I don't know if they came inside.

"So what happened to Michael?"

"He left, I told everybody," her tone was aggrieved, one of offended righteousness. _Why don't you believe me?_

"Michael had very short legs and he couldn't walk very fast, why would he go all the way up those stairs and out of your house, when he knew his mother would be there soon to pick him up?"

"Maybe he missed her and got tired of waiting. I still miss my mother sometimes when I'm at school." With that, a pleasant smile and an expression that said _what else you got?_

Cho stared at the child and she stared back.

"Are you going to catch the person who hurt Michael, Mr Cho?"

"You can call me _Agent_ Cho. Yes, we're going to catch them."

_That grammatical trick again, the definite knowledge that someone specific had hurt the little boy, not a vague whoever._

Jane had remained completely and unusually silent throughout the interview. He had his reasons, perhaps sensing Lisbon's previous concern about him getting too close to a girl so close to his own dead child's age, but moreso than that, he was fascinated by this child. She had far more layers than he had expected, and he had been studying her intently and intensely. He knew about sociopaths, certainly, but was so far neutral on the idea that a child as young as this could manifest such a disorder, and so coldly cause such damage. On the surface she presented as a very normal, pleasant little girl, and maybe it was merely his long habit of finding flaws in every façade that made him think he saw other things swimming below her smile, but now as he watched her he could no longer say for certain if she was very good or very evil.

Academically, if nothing else, a riveting study.

"Alright Jeannie, wait here for a few minutes." Cho stood to go, Jane a beat behind him. Suddenly Jeannie turned and looked him straight in the face. Her eyes were blue-green, perhaps on their way to a brighter green, and they cut Jane a little deeper than he expected.

"When do I get to go home, Mr Jane?"

"We'll let you know when you can call your mom," Cho answered for his friend.

The girl turned her attention to Cho, a little light leaving her face, clearly less enamored of the shorter man.

"Can I have my water now?"

* * *

AN: A long first chapter, I know, but I wrote it all at once and it's hard to break into sections. The psychology in this and subsequent chapters is accurate, although for impact described in perhaps more poetic and less scientific terms. Please review!


	2. Chapter 2

AN: One or two people correctly noted that a minor would have had a lawyer present during questioning. I did have a segment in my original draft about how the little girl had been held originally by local police and was transferred from their custody to CBI's, so there were jurisdictional issues in getting a guardian ad litem, but it was dry and did nothing for the story. As far as this story is concerned, the above is what "happened." In real life, they would still wait for the GAL to show up, or at least call in the parent, but since this is the Mentalist and not Law & Order I opted for the more streamlined version. If it offends anyone I'll edit the previous chapter.

* * *

Where we last left our heroes:

_The girl turned her attention to Cho, a little light leaving her face, clearly less enamored of the shorter man._

_"Can I have my water now?"_

_

* * *

_Outside, Cho sent Rigsby to fetch her a paper cup full of water. A few minutes later he came back, uncomfortable.

"She says she has to go to the bathroom, what should I do?"

Lisbon, mid-debrief with the other boys, stared at him like he'd had a stroke.

"Take her to the bathroom, Rigsby."

"Yeah but- I mean, I'm a…and she's a…"

"She's _seven_, you don't have to go _in_, just walk her there so she doesn't get lost."

Rigsby was still frozen awkwardly to the floor.

"For goodness' sakes, I'll take her," Van Pelt stood, and relief washed over the tall agent's face.

"You better hope you don't have a daughter anytime soon," she remarked sarcastically as she passed him, and relief changed to the look of a deer in the headlights.

"Jane," he hissed when she was out of earshot, "When I was hypnotized all I did was kiss her, right?"

Jane smiled beatifically. "Don't worry, you'd remember _that_."

"I hope you'd remember that," Cho added, a rare smirk on his face, because he loved making Rigsby uncomfortable.

Lisbon couldn't pretend she didn't see Jane's eyes follow the girl every step between the door to the interrogation room and the corner she turned as Van Pelt showed her the way to the ladies' room.

"Jane, are you okay with this case?" she asked, iron in her voice because there had to be, but softness too, because he was part of her team after all, and she'd remove this from his plate if it hurt him needlessly.

He smiled gently. "I am capable of accepting that other people have children, daughters even. I can be around little girls without becoming unhinged, I can do my job, Lisbon." It had the typical Janian drama to it, his careful diction like a man reading a script inside his own head because he still had a taste for the theatrical, whatever his current position.

"Good." The dark-haired agent wouldn't offend his dignity or her own authority by pressing further in front of the others; if something was stuck in Jane's proverbial craw he always turned up in her office doorway later.

"What else, Cho?"

"She seems to have a pretty juvenile idea of murder. Told me if you kill people you go to Hell. But she also seemed pretty damn smug when she told me I couldn't put kids in jail."

"She seemed normal to me," Rigsby objected. The other three just looked at him.

"Did you notice how she tapped her fingers but didn't swing her legs?" Jane put in. Cho hadn't.

"So?"

"So humans use legs are for locomotion, we use our hands for expression. A human being feeling anxiety will jiggle his leg long before he'll tap his hand, it's a subconscious desire to move away from whatever is causing him the anxiety. She wanted to _look_ uncomfortable, but she wasn't really."

"A sociopath does always feel in control of their surroundings," Cho admitted, although Rigsby grimaced, unconvinced.

"And the way she said 'that baby got killed' – she knows a specific person is responsible for his death, but she's reluctant to say any random person did it. If she is a sociopath, her ego wouldn't let her give anyone else credit for her accomplishment." Jane had remained silent throughout the interview not because Cho had ordered him to, but because he was totally absorbed in study of the intriguing personality before him.

Lisbon looked impressed, or at least more open to the idea that the child might really be their killer. Not that she doubted children committed crimes, just that she wanted to be damn sure _this_ one had before it got splashed all over the papers that a team under the direction of Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon had put a seven year old girl in jail for double murder and arson.

"Alright, anything else?"

"Yes." Of course there was.

"She said 'may I' the first time she asked Cho for a drink, but 'can I' the second time. If she was trying to remember her manners she'd have done it the other way around. She was trying to impress us at first, and when Cho and I didn't fall for it, she dropped the act a little.

"There's something focussed about her, I'll admit, but I don't know if she did it…I'd like to watch her a little longer."

Lisbon shrugged; the girl was here until she had satisfactorily answered their questions, which that included Jane's, so he'd get another chance if he wanted it.

"Cho, what do you think?"

"She's definitely got Bad Seed vibe, she said all the right things but there's just something about the way she looked at me."

Lisbon sighed. "Unfortunately the heebie-jeebies are not an acceptable means of detecting crime, so could you please find some hard evidence, or better yet, get her to confess?"

Van Pelt suddenly appeared, looking alarmed.

"She's gone!"

"What?!"

"She's gone, I was waiting outside the bathroom door for her, she was in there a while so I went in to look and she's gone!"

Lisbon looked exasperated. "Seriously? Can't you guys go a single week without losing a suspect or getting beat up?"

Rigsby, the most frequent culprit of both those accusations, ducked his head and jumped out of his chair. Cho hadn't been beaten up recently – he wasn't as big as Rigsby but he was stocky enough to be solid and had that shark-eyed stare besides. Still, he had been the one convinced for the better part of a week that he was cursed by a young Wicca follower, so he too headed for the ladies' room without comment.

Jane, of course, though he had a gun aimed at him in anger several times a month and had recently only narrowly avoided getting hurled headlong off the roof by the significantly larger Agent Rigsby, seemed not to process the rebuke. He did like to be where the party was, though, so with his three playmates gone he was forced to follow. Lisbon forced herself not to roll her eyes and shifted herself from the edge of Rigsby's desk – she made sure to give them time to formulate all their excuses before she arrived.

They found, of course, that there was a window – several in fact – in the ladies' room. Jane had walked in without qualm, probably hoping to discomfit some elderly secretary washing her hands but no such luck. The other men knocked before entering but managed to contain whatever awkwardness they felt.

As in most industrial-administrative environments, little money had been spent on aesthetics for something as inelegant as a public bathroom, but along the top of one wall ran a strip of windows about twelve inches high. They probably fulfilled some fire code requirement for escape routes, as well as saved on lighting when the sun shone in, but were really not meant to see any kind of service as far as opening and closing.

One window, in the corner beside a sink, was unlatched, and had presumably been swung out to allow Jeannie to wriggle through. They were on the first floor, so it wasn't far to drop, though surely it must have seemed so to someone less than four feet tall.

How she had gotten to the window was another thing entirely. Rigsby was the only one of the five who could reach it comfortably. Jane, several inches shorter, could get his hands on it but couldn't see clearly over the sill, Cho and Van Pelt could touch it with their fingertips, and Lisbon couldn't even do that.

A little fingerprint powder confirmed the most logical explanation: the girl had climbed onto the sink and hoisted herself through the window, but it would have taken a moment of analysis on her part to coordinate opening the pane and hauling herself through it. Unfortunately, with a child, as all too often with adults, flight didn't necessarily equal guilt, only fear.

Jeannie had looked composed in interrogation, but there was that moment when she'd looked up at Jane and asked about going home, the childish touch of a pout when she'd repeated her previous assertion that the murdered child had simply left of his own volition. Composure didn't mean she hadn't been frightened or intimidated, just that she might have been too polite to tell the men questioning her that they were frightening her.

But there was that matter of that other room with high windows, from which another child had disappeared, a room which Jeannie had also occupied.

* * *

AN2: My thanks to all the reviewers! Hope this one piques your interest as well.


	3. Chapter 3

_But there was that matter of that other room with high windows, from which another child had disappeared, a room which Jeannie had also occupied._

_

* * *

_Van Pelt had an APB out on the child, plus an Amber Alert for good measure, within moments of reseating herself at her computer. The few years' youth she had on her colleagues gave her more computer savvy than they could acquire in a decade – the generation gap grew wider every year, which meant adolescent was the new adult, and anything older was ancient.

The others all contributed what was customary: a phone call to the girl's mother, alerting her school and other places she frequented. The mother, naturally, flew into a state midway between irate and distraught, but between Lisbon's firm authority and Jane's soft reassurance, they got her calmed down.

An hour later, she called back to say her daughter had just walked in the door, thirsty but unharmed after a bus ride and a short walk. Rather than ask her returned to their headquarters, the team took the opportunity to interview the mother as well, and they arrived to find an attractive, well-kept house on what appeared to be a fairly safe street.

The yard was neat without being overly-manicured, the lawn recently mowed but the flowers clearly subject to being picked or trampled by eager hands and careless shoes. Inside, it had the same feel of every stranger's home – the little things one couldn't help but notice that differed from their own habits. Some people kept tissues in the bathroom, others kept air freshener. Some people hung potholders above their stove, others kept fresh fruit in a bowl or magnets on the refrigerator. No one had quite the same combination of minuscule details, and it was impossible to avoid thinking everyone else's home slightly foreign.

To Jane, naturally, this was always a utopia of personal minutia to unravel about a person, and it was very seldom he could restrain himself from wandering about, poking into rooms and matters he had little business in.

In this case, while the rest of the team occupied mother and daughter in the living room, he trailed upstairs to survey the bedrooms. Parents' room, largest and most sparsely furnished, was fairly bland – a large double bed, a couple of dressers, nighttables, a throw rug on the floor and a door to the bathroom in which Jane found only the standard toiletries.

Next was the little boy's room, closest to the parents in case he cried in the night. He still slept in a crib, had an assortment of picture books and early learning toys spread on the floor. Seemed developmentally on target, from what Jane could tell. He had once had to know such things, and the memories vexed him some. A grudge, perhaps, against these inoffensive people and their healthy, living child.

He wasn't sure if he should steel himself before entering Jeannie's room, or even if he should go in at all. Would it wound, bruise, or make any difference at all, to see how a girl this age lived, how his own would have lived by now? In the end, he walked in as he walked into everything, with a swift, light step and more confidence than was his right.

Mercifully he saw nothing of his own child here, because she had not lived to be this age, and so nothing about the room reminded him of her. He was, however, immediately beset by that same sense of a layered personality – but was she merely a clever child, or actually something more? She had the usual paraphernalia, a few dolls, a few books, thicker than her brother's but not yet with chapters, an unmade bed and a set of pyjamas discarded on the floor. There was no stuffed animal propped on the bed or half-hidden in the covers, and no night-light on any wall – she appeared to play with little girls' toys, but other little girls slept with bunnies or dolls, and didn't like the dark.

Interesting.

In fact, from what he could see, she had a far smaller number of toys compared to books and games than Jane had observed in her brother's room. An inconsistency he would have to sort out.

Downstairs the interview was wrapping up. Jeannie claimed to have run because she was afraid of going to jail, and with her mother's arms clasped firmly around her, who could argue? The mother herself was articulate and helpful, though clearly stressed by the activities of the past few days. She sent both her children downstairs and tried to provide as complete answers as possible.

Jane arrived on the scene just as everyone was standing and shaking hands.

"Are your children afraid of the dark?" He asked the mother without introduction.

She considered. "No, well Jeannie's not, Christopher is, though, terrified. We put both nightlights in his room but even so he screams and screams at bedtime. It's quite an ordeal."

"Could we see him? Christopher, I mean?"

The mother looked slightly taken aback but shrugged. "He's too little to talk really still, the other police didn't really ask him any questions. He's in the playroom with Jeannie, I just sent them down. In the basement, through here."

She led them down a carpeted staircase into a well-lit area clearly given over to more raucous play. Like most basements, it had become the home of all the furniture in the house that didn't match anything else: a couple of chairs, a questionably painted bookcase, a badly sagging sofa all supported a general layer of toys and other childish articles.

Jeannie was reading on the sofa while her brother sat on the floor playing. He looked up, big smile for his mother when he saw her and a toddler's Frankenstein gait when he came over.

Jane frowned ever so slightly, but erased his face like an Etch-A-Sketch before the mother could see.

"You're right, he is very young to be answering questions. Thank-you, we'll be going now."

Lisbon, who'd followed Jane to make sure he didn't say anything to really offend the one person who'd cooperated so far, sighed and made the more formal goodbyes. The other three, still waiting upstairs, took their cue when Jane emerged from the basement, and filed out.

Last in line, Jane turned in the threshold and said something to Mrs Washington no one else could hear. She looked briefly concerned, but seemed to thank him before she closed the door.

"What was that about?" Rigsby asked.

"The little boy walks funny."

"He walks funny? He's fourteen months old." Van Pelt, of course.

"No, he walks like he's in pain. I told his mother to have him checked immediately."

A round-robin discussion in their bullpen spread around the various datapoints but solidified little. Jeannie's mother reported she performed satisfactorily in school, had few friends but seemed well-liked by her teacher, did chores when asked and was particular about how she liked things. She was an amenable child when she agreed with whatever was happening, but was insistent on getting her own way at times. In the past she had shown such temper her mother or teacher had had to strongly discipline her, but appeared to be aging out of this phase.

Jane, for his part, shared what he had gleaned from his poking around. Nothing earth-shattering, a few good traits – parents who put their children before themselves, witness their meagerly furnished bedroom – and a few bad ones – the usual little secrets to be found in a married couple's drawers. What he did find interesting, was the disparity between Christopher Washington's bedroom and his older sister's.

"Where are her toys?"

"Maybe she has less," Cho remarked.

"Or her parents took them as punishment," Rigsby contributed, and earned a slightly scandalized look from Van Pelt, who clearly thought taking a child's toys was right up there with chaining them to a radiator.

"No her brother had a fairly even mix of books, toys, and games. The mix in the playroom was similar. Only Jeannie's room had more books than toys."

"You think the parents favor the boy?" An interesting way of putting it, from Van Pelt, so used to competing with bigger, stronger brothers for things that she probably didn't even realize she'd categorized the favoritism in terms of gender.

"No, their playroom had just as many toys for Jeannie as it did for Christopher. I think she's done something with them."

"Like what?" Rigsby spent more time sitting on his desk than at it, they all did. It afforded them the ability to stand and pace if they needed to.

"Serial killers start small, they mutilate animals, light matches, before they graduate to murder and arson. A sociopath branching out this young might start even smaller. A doll is like a very little person, and a stuffed animal is easier to catch than a real one. We need to find her toys, though I venture to guess we may not like what we find she's done with them."

A fair point, so amongst other things a warrant was duly submitted, but surprisingly stuffed animals just didn't rate that high a priority against heroin and unregistered handguns. The judge would get to it when he had less pressing matters.

Next day, no better evidence to link the girl to the crimes and no evidence at all to suggest the involvement of another, the team was running lukewarm at best. A midday phone call from an agitated Mrs Washington summoned Rigsby and Jane to the hospital while Cho and Lisbon visited the site of the fire and Van Pelt, as per usual, manned phones.

X-rays backlit with clean white light showed them the bottom half of a child's body, one slide from pelvis to knees and the other from knees to feet.

Bones structure was good, growth plates wide open, and proportions appropriate – everything normal and healthy, except for something like twenty white shards floating in the dark spaces that were muscle and flesh, from hip to ankle.

Both agents stared for a moment, orienting themselves to what they were seeing.

"Looks like toothpicks," Rigsby commented, and they did, only wood wouldn't show up so clear on an X-ray.

"Needles," Jane volunteered, cocking an eyebrow at the grave-faced doctor. Mrs Washington went slightly to pieces at hearing the word again out loud and the doctor nodded. Someone, at some point and probably over a considerable period of time, had inserted sewing needles into the little boy's legs and groin.

* * *

AN: The plot thickens! Hope you're still enjoying. I love the reviews, and thanks to those who asked clarifying questions.


	4. Chapter 4

_Both agents stared for a moment, orienting themselves to what they were seeing._

"_Needles," Jane volunteered, cocking an eyebrow at the grave-faced doctor. Mrs Washington went slightly to pieces at hearing the word out loud and the doctor nodded. Someone, at some point and probably over a considerable period of time, had inserted sewing needles into the little boy's legs and groin._

* * *

Some were shallowly placed, others deeper, at varying angles that suggested either experimentation on the part of the perpetrator or the migration of the needles over time – probably both. Most would be monitored but not removed; to cut into such a small child after such a small object would do more damage than to leave it in, but others were dangerously close to joints or highly mobile areas of tissue, one even perilously near his bladder, and would have to be taken out before they caused deformation or crippling pain.

No doubt the child was already in some amount of pain, judging from the ginger walk Jane had noticed and his reluctance to roughhouse.

Information was collected whether it related to their case or not, because two dozen needles in the body of the brother of their suspect couldn't possibly be a coincidence, and if it was, they couldn't just tell his helpless mother, weeping in the hospital corridor, that it wasn't their problem.

"We know why he hates the dark," Jane remarked when they were again released into the California sunshine.

"Someone does this to him at night?" Rigsby had a good head on his shoulders when he wanted to use it.

"Yes, his father or his sister."

"Not the mother?"

"If she had done it, she wouldn't have taken him to the doctor. And she was truly horrified at the sight of those needles on the X-ray."

Rigsby couldn't argue with that; he'd been a little horrified himself.

"But who comes up with something like that? I mean, where would anyone get that kind of idea?"

Jane shrugged. "Sociopaths are incapable of sympathy or empathy for others, and they have no conscience. Many of them enjoy inflicting pain on others, either because it gratifies them or just to see what happens. When they finally executed him, the famous serial killer Albert Fish was found to have twenty-nine sewing needles embedded in his…." Jane raised his eyebrows and gestured downwards.

Rigsby followed the gesture and cringed. "That's messed up."

Jane nodded emphatically. He didn't add that Albert Fish had been caught after he killed _and ate_ a girl of twelve, and that according to legend when he went to the electric chair those twenty-nine needles short-circuited the current so they had to shock him twice. _Amazing what you learn trying to get into your own serial killer's head._

"I'm still not convinced the little girl did any of this. I mean, she's only seven." Rigsby asserted.

"What age would you be comfortable with a child beginning to kill?"

"Uh…well…no age," the larger man stammered. "I just…I'm used to seeing criminals with that light in their eyes, you know? The really bad guys, the ones who do it for fun, it's easy to look at them like an animal, but this little girl – well, she's just a little girl."

Jane looked at him as if seeing something fresh. "What an insightful thing to say, Rigsby, I'm proud of you."

Rigsby couldn't help the half a grin that flashed on his face before he squelched it.

"Let's see what Lisbon and Cho dug up. Can I drive?"

"Nope. Boss's orders." And Rigsby might have been mildly unsettled by Jane at times but he was honestly afraid of Agent Lisbon, so Jane had to ride shotgun with a petulant look on his face.

With the team reassembled, Rigsby and Jane shared what they'd seen at the hospital and Cho and Lisbon filled them in on the fire site and the canvas of the other neighbors. Van Pelt had come up with background on the Washington parents and those of the murdered boy – a little credit card debt and a few parking tickets but no lengthy prison terms or psychiatric hospitalizations.

Now she was typing data into an arson modeling program, according to what Cho was reading off. Given what the crime scene unit had learned about where and how the fire started, this would show how quickly it had spread and a few other details that amounted to an arsonist's signature. A pathological arsonist plans a fire like a hopeless romantic plans a date, and for the same reasons. He – or, less frequently, she – sets up a fire to provide maximum gratification, and the sweetest memories later on. Over time, they discover little things that enhance the experience, and these preferences become a pattern unique to the individual, as impossible to duplicate as Grandma's cookie recipe.

A budding arsonist, of course, like an inexperienced lover, was likely still experimenting, and making rookie mistakes, but would still show tendencies that Joe Citizen would not. Hand any random person off the street a box of matches and ask them to light a house on fire, and they'd run up, strike a single match or possibly two, touch it to the first piece of wood they saw, and run.

Hand a pyromaniac a box of matches and ask them to light a house on fire, and they'd strike several matches just to savor the sulfur scent and the undulating flame. Then they'd study the house from every angle, decide which area was sheltered enough to harbor that flame, to feed it until it was big enough to do its job. They'd light it strategically, perhaps more than one place, all along a windowsill or across the bottom edge of the siding.

And then they'd watch it burn.

Whoever had burned Mrs McMahon's house – and Mrs McMahon – was not a full-fledged arsonist, but they were no stranger to fire. Had it begun in one or two other spots it would have been an even more massive blaze, and probably burned the houses on either side to the ground as well, but given necessities of concealment and speed, the culprit had done well.

According to the model, which now played silently for them like a primitive video game, the layout of the house and the flow of the air conditioning meant that the flames had essentially come in the back door and gone straight up the staircase. A lot of wood paneling in her home, a lot to burn, which had stayed the fire long enough for her to wake to choking smoke in her bedroom, long enough for her to see her every exit barred by leaping tongues of orange. The old lady had known she was not going to escape, had known she was going to cook there in what for years had been a place of comfort and safety. Sure enough, the firemen had found her curled in the bathtub like a spider, limbs contracted from the heat, mercifully dead of smoke inhalation before the flames licked away her flesh.

All this, according to Jane, would have been visible from Jeannie Washington's bedroom window for long minutes before her family saw the danger and fled their own house.

* * *

AN: Thank-you for all the reviews. Sorry so long without an update, my computer went down. Enjoy!


	5. Chapter 5

_According to the model, the layout of the house and the flow of the air conditioning meant that the flames had essentially come in the back door and gone straight up the staircase. A lot of wood paneling in her home, a lot to burn, which had stayed the fire long enough for her to know she was not going to escape_

_All this, according to Jane, would have been visible from Jeannie Washington's bedroom window for long minutes before her family saw the danger and fled their own house._

* * *

"I think she did it," Jane announced. "I think she did it, she loved it, and she'd do it again. She will do it again, until she's stopped."

Several pairs of eyes turned his way, some open to convincing and others less so.

"Based on what?" Van Pelt asked, curious rather than argumentative.

"Well, either _Mrs_ Washington or an unknown person abducted and murdered Michael King, _Mr_ Washington stuck his son full of needles, and a _third_ person burned down their next-door neighbor's house, or Jeannie Washington is a very naughty little girl who likes to play with matches and somewhere has a box full of dolls with no heads."

"Jane's right," Cho said. "Violates the Law of Parsimony for three criminal acts to be committed by three separate people when the same person can be responsible for all of them. Especially one as creepy as that kid."

"But why would she do it?" Van Pelt again, trying to scale down her mental image of a sociopath to accommodate a first grader.

"Why does Rigsby wear his watch on his right arm?" Jane asked rhetorically. "The world may never know."

Rigsby jumped a little as the rest of the team suddenly turned to stare at his arm. He moved it behind his knee.

"Alright, alright, we agree the little girl is the same person who killed the baby, burned the neighbor's house, and hurt her brother, but we're going to need a lot better plan of attack if you're going to make a convincing argument for arresting her, much less getting the AAG to convict her of anything," Lisbon conceded, saving Rigsby from the flush that had flown quickly up his ears.

"Go, strategize, don't let Jane do anything outrageous." The dark haired agent returned to her office to prepare a briefing to Minelli, who was going to need a fresh bottle of antacid when he heard they wanted to arrest a seven year old.

"Dude I thought you were right-handed," Cho cornered Rigsby back in the bullpen.

"I am," he hissed back.

"Then why do you wear your watch on the same hand?"

"I dunno, I just always have. It's more comfortable. I dunno. We're supposed to be strategizing."

Cho smirked as Rigsby squirmed

They did strategize, coming eventually to something like a plan of action. Sociopaths, as observed, always felt in control of their surroundings. When they were in control, or when things were going their way naturally, all was well. It was when they lost control and desired to regain it, or they were dissatisfied with their circumstances, that they became dangerous.

Not all sociopaths became killers, it must be noted, just as not all killers were sociopaths, and many sociopaths went their entire lives without ever becoming dangerous or disruptive. Sociopathy did not make one a criminal or even a bad person – a difficult person, probably, or a controlling one, but a human being stripped of any ability to feel compassion for others could not be blamed for displaying selfishness.

Laws were meant to enclose everyone, however, and while a lack of empathy might explain insensitivity, it would not excuse murder. Jeannie had to be contained. It would not help her, but it would protect everyone else.

It was the warrant that really saved them; their permission to search house and grounds for Jeannie's supposedly missing toys. The judge had challenged them quite seriously on the validity of such a request, and Lisbon had had to do some fast talking to turn what amounted to Jane's gut instinct into something like probable cause.

They executed the warrant during the day while Jeannie was at school, her mother pacing awkwardly below stairs, torn between her obligation towards hospitality and her desire to protect her child.

After a thorough sweep of the main floor, the boys checked the front and back yards, Van Pelt took the basement, and Lisbon and Jane handled the bedrooms. More specifically, Lisbon handled the bedrooms, and Jane skulked behind her, a taller, fairer shadow that, like light from a prism, had to be frequently refocused.

He poked deeper into drawers than strictly necessary, opened closets and read the spines of books, and Lisbon watched him from the corner of her eye to be sure he broke nothing, stole nothing, and, more crucially, was being done no harm by investigating this little girl.

In the parents' room, nothing to be found, except the lingerie Jane held up with a raised eyebrow and mischievous smile, curtailed but not much dampened by Lisbon's own frosty expression.

The brother's room also yielded little, until the thin beam of her CBI-issue flashlight caught the outline of something beneath the chest of drawers: not a toy, but oddly shaped and faintly reflective. It was a narrow fit for Lisbon's already smallish hand, to reach under the low dresser, but could have easily been fished out by someone with a larger one with a ruler or the edge of a book. A wheel of sewing needles. A good idea, to keep them in the same room as the victim, so the perpetrator couldn't be found with them in his or her possession. This at least confirmed that the boy had suffered the abuse at home, though did little to point definitively to either father or sister.

Encouraged by this small amount of progress, Lisbon moved tentatively towards Jeannie's room. Jane had already been in it once, of course, but being somewhere unsettling alone is different than being somewhere unsettling while being watched by someone who knows it is unsettling.

He followed her without comment, began his usual round of snooping.

"Most people can feel it when another person stares at them," he remarked, opening the closet. A few frocks, shirts, last year's Easter dress; on the floor two or three pairs of shoes, nothing smeared with blood or smelling of ash.

"I wasn't staring at you," Lisbon quirked one corner of her mouth, because she was lying, he knew it, and she knew he knew.

"You made it clear you don't trust me, but would you believe me, for now, that if I have trouble with this case I will tell you?"

"Will you?" Lisbon raised an eyebrow, cocked her head. Trust, no, and he was not exactly a man of his word, but he made deals, when it suited his purpose to hold up his end.

"I promise. Now come help me look in this crawlspace?" The mentalist's face went from serious to impish so quickly he might as well have been Janus instead of Jane, jerking his head towards the square trapdoor in the ceiling of the closet. His eyes crinkled with childlike mirth, but Lisbon knew it was the emotional version of one of his specialties: diversion.

"That's too high for her," she protested, because she was intended to.

"She likes to climb on things. Come on, I'll give you a boost." He laced his fingers together, gestured for her to step up. She considered for half a second how that would look, and used the yardstick propped in the corner to tap on the underside of the trapdoor. Nailed shut, no access for them or Jeannie.

Jane pouted that she'd scuttled his idea, but was soon pressed against the wall trying to see behind a bookcase. Lisbon sighed, knew she couldn't make him be serious enough here where the contrast was so plain between the girl who slept each night in this soft warm bed and the one who slept forever in a colder, narrower one beneath a carved angel.

Jeannie had a school workbook on her small desk, smudged pencil betraying her a lefty. Nothing stridently atypical to a smallish female child: there was some costume jewellery on her dresser, a can of Play-Doh on a play table, the other odds and ends Jane had noted before, and not many places to hide a lot of errant toys.

"Eenie, meenie, mynie…" Jane said, kneeling swiftly to peer under the bed. A few dustbunnies, which meant Mom didn't vacuum there too often.

"Moe!" He said, looking up with a bright smile. He hauled out a child's size suitcase, a bright design emblazoned on it for easy identification. A single motion unzipped the lid and flipped it back, revealing the case filled to the brim with stuffed animals and dolls.

After she took the requisite photographs, Lisbon lifted out the topmost creature, apparently intact, but as she straightened its head lolled sideways, attached only on one side. She gasped, thinking for a moment she herself had damaged it, but caught sight as she did of the object Jane had pulled out. A doll, once a fairly pretty one, eyes coloured a flat black with what looked like magic marker, hair cut unevenly and nose chopped off, the rubber ragged around the hole. Every creature they unpacked had been treated similarly, which is to say badly, most in widely varying ways but a few showing the same damage again and again.

She was honing her tastes.

* * *

AN: I love how many people are hoping she's innocent. Thanks for the reviews! Hope you enjoy.


	6. Chapter 6

_After she took the requisite photographs, Lisbon lifted out the topmost creature, apparently intact, but as she straightened its head lolled sideways, attached only on one side. She gasped, thinking for a moment she herself had damaged it, but caught sight as she did of the object Jane had pulled out. A doll, once a fairly pretty one, eyes coloured a flat black, hair cut unevenly and nose chopped off, the rubber ragged around the hole. Every creature they unpacked had been treated similarly, which is to say badly, most in widely varying ways but a few showing the same damage again and again. _

_She was honing her tastes._

* * *

The proper documentation taken care of, the pair repacked all the tortured souls and Lisbon wrapped the whole thing in plastic to take with them. Jane seemed nervously fascinated by what he'd seen, if nervous was a word that could ever be applied to him; unnerved by the brutality shown something that was by definition sweet and wholesome but entranced all the same by the unusual and the macabre.

He must have once bought such things for his own daughter, toys that had been met with delight, and well-loved, but this child was so far from what that other little girl must have been – from what any little girl must be – that Lisbon wondered if he was able to draw any comparisons at all. Perhaps that was what protected him now, and if so, how fortunate for them all.

"Cho, come on in," she spoke briefly into her cell phone. The suitcase was not large, but it was an awkward size to carry with its handle and wheels now tightly bound in cling wrap, and Jane would have offered as etiquette demanded except that they bowed to greater gods than manners at CBI and as a contractor he could surrender evidence to his colleagues for processing but not remove it from the scene.

"Grace!" He called from the front hall. Van Pelt appeared a moment later, chagrined that he was shouting through someone else's house. He always had his reasons, but he rarely shared them, and no one doubted that mostly he behaved as he did for no other reason than because it simply amused him to do so.

"Find anything?" Lisbon asked. The younger agent shrugged in a general negative.

"Some marks on the sofa where someone stacked a chair, I took photos. Nothing else."

Rigsby, in the front door with the practiced tread of a large man who had learned stealth – out of respect for the person in whose home he was intruding, as well as for occasional survival – took the suitcase from Lisbon without a word.

"What's in the box?" Cho looked at it appraisingly, judged it too small to contain a whole body but perhaps bloody clothes or, if he was lucky, a body part.

"This one's better seen in person," Lisbon deflected. Jane looked vaguely ill.

"Did you recover anything?"

Both men shook their heads. "Soft grass, no mud for footprints, no trace evidence like matches or blood drops. Scratches on the outside of the basement window frame where it's been opened but the parents say they air the basement out every few months." Cho, in his usual staccato fashion, disgusted by his own lack of case-breaking discovery.

"Alright, Rigsby, take that out to the truck. I've got to tell the mother the good news."

"Charging her, boss?" Rigsby asked over his shoulder. His eyes flicked to the case in his arms, wondering if it was something he should be wary of.

"Yes, but carefully, there's not much precedent on this. I'd rather you not all be there, the less intimidating, the better." The three junior agents knew their cue when they heard it and headed for the door, Jane alone tried his luck.

"C'mon Lisbon, she likes me," he wheedled, charming smile screwed firmly in place.

"They all like you," she was not impressed. "Oh alright, come on."

Teresa Lisbon was a very pretty woman, and Jane often appreciated the way emotions drew themselves across her face. One of the privileges of being lead agent was that she seldom needed to edit the information her expressions showed, and Mrs Washington took one look now and sank unsteadily into a chair.

"Mrs Washington, we've found reason to believe your daughter might have some information she hasn't shared with us about the deaths of Michael King and Aileen McMahon, and the injuries your son Christopher sustained over the past several months." It was the thousandth variation on a standard script, fill in names and crimes where applicable, apologize for inconvenience if the person seemed easily offended. Virtually meaningless to her now, like the Miranda warning she or any member of her team rattled off routinely in the same breathless monotone as a Catholic praying the rosary.

Mrs Washington, on the other hand, had never heard the words before and seemed to be working hard to process them.

"We'd like to ask Jeannie some more questions. I think it would be least stressful for her if you brought her to the Statehouse when she gets home from school. When do you think that will be?"

"When…?" The woman seemed a sentence behind, struggling to catch up.

"It will be less stressful for you, too," Jane smiled gently, leaned past Lisbon and Mrs Washington looked up at the more human tone in his voice.

"Bring her over, we can all sit down and sort things out, what do you say?"

"Yes, yes…I can bring her…she gets home at three thirty, I'll bring her then." A wan smile for Jane and a blank-eyed gaze for Lisbon, but they had the agreement they needed.

A few more polite technical platitudes, the requisite politer good-bye, as if they had merely come for tea and unfortunately had to depart early, and outside Van Pelt had already lost the rock-paper-scissors game they used to decide who got return to the Statehouse and who had to keep watch a little way up the street in the other SUV, in case Mom got ideas about disappearing acts.

Fortunately, mother and daughter arrived right on schedule, younger brother in tow. Mrs Washington had assumed a taut look, with creases around her mouth and hair coming loose from its style. She was still composed, however, still seemingly determined to be helpful.

Jeannie was still dressed for school, a public elementary judging by her lack of uniform. She looked neat and pretty, seemed pleased to recognize the agents that stood to usher her into interrogation and her mother into the observation room beside it.

"Ma'am, we can't question her without her guardian ad litem present. He was absent before because of some jurisdictional issues relating to her transfer from the local police department. Now, you can waive her rights, but legally I'm obligated to advise you against that," Lisbon recited another well-worn script, although her legal obligation went diametrically contrary to her true preferences.

Mrs Washington considered. She looked at Christopher in her arms, moved a few fingers over the skin of his bare lower legs.

"The doctors told me what happened to Chris most likely happened in our home."

Lisbon pressed her lips together, also envisioning what she had seen on the X-ray Rigsby had brought her. "Yes ma'am, that's true."

"My husband wouldn't do something like that. He-he can't even sew on a button, he wouldn't even know where to find a needle in our house."

Lisbon waited, her team standing by behind her.

"I don't know what happened to Mikey King…but he didn't leave on his own…and I don't see how Jeannie could have done such a horrible thing to him or to her brother. I don't believe she did it," _liar_, thought Jane, "but if she didn't I don't need her to have a lawyer, right?"

She took a sudden shuddery breath. "And if she did do it, I wan- I _need_ her to say it for you, so we can finish all this." What exactly she meant by that she didn't specify, though it would likely have been along the lines of getting help for her sick daughter. It did enough damage to have a loved one, any loved one, accused of murder; to have them be guilty of it meant the damage had only just begun.

"Just to be clear, Mrs Washington, you are waiving your daughter's right to counsel?"

Her eyes darted form side to side, seeking affirmation she did not find that she was making the right decision. A heavy breath, and a tightening of her arms around her son. She seemed to gather resolve from the presence of her other child.

"Yes. Even if she hurt people, I'm still her mother. I still make the decisions about what's right for her. If she lied to you before, about knowing something or doing something, she needs to tell you." It wasn't as simple perhaps as Mrs Washington would wish; that a naughty child could confess a misdeed and an apology could be issued to make it right, but her abrupt mastery of her doubt gave Lisbon enough confidence in the woman's competence to proceed.

"Alright, well, thank-you for your cooperation Mrs Washington. Agent Rigsby is going to show you to our observation room, you can watch Jeannie from there. I'll be in shortly; now if you're uncomfortable at any time you can stop us and ask for Jeannie's guardian ad litem." Lisbon provided her with a company smile and Rigsby stepped up. He didn't have Jane's charisma, and Mrs Washington clearly wished he did, judging from the glance she threw over her shoulder at the blond consultant, but the tall man did have a down home honesty to him, and the yes-ma'am smile as he held the door open did the trick.

Cho too knew his place, and went to go relieve Van Pelt in the interrogation room where, as the only other female agent, she was supervising Jeannie pending arrival of counsel, or waiver of rights.

When the stocky agent walked in he was mildly, though not visibly, surprised to find both females largely motionless, Van Pelt leaning against the one-way glass and Jeannie seated across from her at the narrow table. They were watching one another but not much else, unless breathing counted, and Cho had always been a great one for the staring contests but something about the stillness in the room was unnerving. He guessed, however, and correctly, that it was Van Pelt's way of maintaining control, since interaction with the child might betray some insecurity on the part of the young agent that the girl could exploit.

"Staying?" He asked tonelessly. Van Pelt fixed large eyes on her colleague for a moment.

"Sure." When she moved to the corner, giving him room to run the interrogation, her eyes returned to Jeannie like a homing beacon. It was the look of someone with a score to settle, and, given Van Pelt's total faith in human goodness and the damage Jeannie was doing it, such a look was not entirely unwarranted.

Jeannie, for her part, turned her attention to the alpha male. She waited for him to speak, like any child faced with adult authority, but give it a decade and she'd be taunting her interrogator and laughing all the way to the bank.

Some time later, the same proverbial ground gone over several more times without result, Lisbon tapped on the glass.

Mrs Washington came in to sit with her daughter, and try to explain the importance of cooperating with the police, while the four agents and the hitherto remarkably useless Jane had a minor come-to-Jesus meeting.

"What's the deal, Cho?" Lisbon asked. He was a straight-forward man, appreciated others extending the same courtesy to him.

He shrugged, briefly showing an extra inch of bicep as his shirt sleeve rode up. "She's seven, boss. She didn't see, she was upstairs, she was reading a book, she doesn't remember," he enumerated her various excuses, ostensibly flimsy except for being voiced by a first-grader who couldn't even tell time yet.

"She knows she can get away with murder," Jane warned, not a remotely helpful comment.

Several pairs of eyes shot him glances that said as much, and he continued. "Without a confession she goes free, probably for years and maybe forever.

"Have you ever heard the expression that human beings die by the Rule of Three? Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. There are a lot of other threes, too. There are three warning signs for sociopathy, and three murders make a serial killer.

"Jeannie mutilates animals and sets fires, and she's already killed twice. The question is not _if_ she'll kill again, but when. She's a serial killer at heart, she just doesn't have the number yet, and we can't afford to let her make it that far. By then her technique will be so highly evolved she may never be caught again."

* * *

AN: Thank-you to everyone who is giving me feedback, I'm finding it very helpful in writing certain characters. Should be another two or three chapters, I hope you keep reading!


	7. Chapter 7

AN: Minor warning, we all know now Jeannie did it; if you don't want to hear a little girl confess to murder read judicially.

* * *

"_Jeannie mutilates animals and sets fires, and she's already killed twice. The question is not if she'll kill again, but when. She's a serial killer at heart, she just doesn't have the number yet, and we can't afford to let her make it that far. By then her technique will be so highly evolved she may never be caught again."_

_

* * *

_"So how do we force a confession?" Lisbon this time, vague rebuke behind the question because it was her place to tell the team who needed confessions, when, and how.

"As long as she feels in control she'll be difficult to trap. Take away her control – prove you know something about her she didn't think you knew."

"You have something in mind?" Cho had a pretty good idea where Jane was heading, but asked the question anyway because every performer needed a straight man, even if they were light years from Vaudeville and the question was nothing like _Who's on first_. No one would laugh when the act was over, either, but still the show must go on.

Jane crinkled his eyes. "Props. Lisbon and I found her stash of toys, and what she did to them, but she doesn't know that. Confront her with the evidence of her crimes, if she thinks we can already prove she committed murder it may unsettle her enough to talk. Plus, sociopaths are narcissists - they believe themselves superior to others and they love an opportunity to prove it. Once you get her talking, she won't be able to resist telling you how cleverly she did it all."

Rigsby flipped out an X-acto knife with the air of a Shark ready to switchblade a Jet, and slit the plastic wrapping on the suitcase Jane and Lisbon had retrieved.

"You might want to be careful with that," Jane said, in a tone that suggested Rigsby could get more than he bargained for. Sure enough, when the taller man opened the case, what he saw was hidden from the group by the suitcase lid, but they had a full view of his face when what he was looking at registered.

Intellectually, Cho knew it couldn't be a body part, because it would have been taken directly to the morgue in biohazard bags, but from Rigsby's expression it might as well have been. Not what it was, exactly, that caused such shock, but where it had come from and why, because any doll can lose an arm, any stuffed animal have its ears loved away, for toys come to grief in a myriad of ways through rough play or dirt or wear – but Jeannie had systematically and gruesomely dismantled hers, and while a long-treasured teddy bear with a ribbon round its neck and missing eyes is a casualty of childhood, a teddy bear with a ligature round its neck and pencils stuck through its eyes is a casualty of something else altogether.

Rigsby was at a loss for the proper response, though he reached for an evidence box to store the suitcase contents. Cho craned his neck for a better view and raised his eyebrows. Van Pelt, also looking a little squeamish – probably picturing a favorite friend she still kept propped on a shelf in her bedroom – was the one to ask,

"This is what Jeannie doesn't know we have?"

"These are her private treasures…It would be like someone stealing paintings from Van Gogh." Jane waxed a tad eloquent and earned a look from Lisbon.

"Van Gogh was penniless in his own lifetime," she pointed out on principle, earning a reproachful look of her own.

"But it _is_ our ace in the hole. Show her these, make her angry or talkative enough to confess. Otherwise she goes home."

"To her baby brother and a life of undetectable crime," Van Pelt was upset by this prospect. Lisbon gave her a _well, go_ expression and went to usher Mrs Washington back to observation.

Cho, nominally running the interrogation, held the door while Van Pelt entered, stood against the wall with a cardboard box in her arms. Jane took his seat and leaned over the table with a smile not entirely pleasant.

"We found something of yours, Jeannie, under your bed. Can you tell us why they look like this?" Jane asked calmly, as Van Pelt tilted the evidence box and sent a cascade of decapitated dolls and mutilated stuffed animals across the steel table.

The change was immediate and electric.

"Those are mine, those are _mine_! Why did you take them, they're mine, put them back! You can't touch my things!"

She sounded very like any other child having a temper tantrum, except that in her eyes crackled a titanic fury.

"Settle down or we'll have someone help you," Cho warned. Seven or thirty-seven, if a suspect became too rowdy, he had no qualms about muscling them into their seat and shackling them to the floor.

Jeannie at least recognized that her own previously irresistible force had now met a greater immovable object in the stony agent, and subsided into her chair with a look of absolute hatred on her young face.

Quite an astonishing thing, hatred – it transformed her little girl's face, her blue-green eyes and neat brown hair, into a sick sort of caricature. It was as if some older, crueler thing were playing at being a child, but now, the farce over, was revealing itself.

Cho and Jane had never seen quite the like, but neither man was often surprised. Van Pelt, against the wall should she be needed, was transfixed despite herself. Horror, yes, but macabre fascination, because the image of this child here, the one of her bloody victim, and the one of smoking ruins of an old lady's home were so jarringly at odds.

"What happened to your toys, Jeannie?" Cho asked. Jane had been quietly lining up the heads of the guillotined dolls, his eyes never leaving the little girl. They now sat in a row before her, some without eyes, without hair, others with numerous puncture marks in the soft rubber, and more inked with Crayola-colored black eyes and bloody bruises. _J'accuse. _

Jeannie looked at the line of damaged faces.

"I wanted to see what was inside them."

"What did you think was inside them?"

Another pause, another almost longing glance at her creations.

"I wanted them to bleed like real people," she frowned, annoyed. "But they're just stupid plastic."

"Is that why you had to kill Michael? Because you wanted to see a real person bleed?" Cho had expected Jane to jump in, to poke the hornets' nest as he so excelled at doing, but the blond man might as well have been carved from ice.

"It's not my fault," Jeannie shrugged, as if she were being very reasonable. "I was only going to hurt him, but he kept saying he was going to tell his mommy, so I had to kill him."

Behind one-way glass, Lisbon and Rigsby shuddered.

"I don't think," Rigsby said very distinctly, "that I ever want children."

Lisbon patted his arm.

"Tell us what happened," Cho prompted.

"We were downstairs playing and somebody rang the doorbell. I climbed out the window with Michael while Mom was talking."

"How did you reach the window?"

Jeannie looked at him scornfully. "The way I reached the window in your bathroom here, I climbed on stuff. I can lift the chairs down there, I put one on top of the table. Michael wasn't very heavy."

"Then what?"

"I took him out where the tall grass was and hit him and stuff. I wasn't going to kill him but he was going to tell, so he made me kill him."

"How did you kill him?"

"My mom always says not to play with plastic bags because you can suffocate in them, so I found a plastic bag on the ground and put it over his face. I leaned on it to make sure."

"We didn't find him with a plastic bag."

"No, I took it off when he stopped moving to make sure he was dead. I threw it away, it was dirty."

"And he was dead?"

Jeannie nodded helpfully. "Yes."

"Then what happened?"

"I had heard Miz McMahon talking upstairs, she always talks for a long long time, so I knew I had enough time to go out with Michael. I ran back and crawled back through the window and took the chair off the table. Miz McMahon was leaving right then, I think she saw me climb in the window."

"So you killed her too?"

"I had to, she would have told." Again, that sense of wounded reason, as if Jeannie had made the only logical choice and didn't understand why she was being persecuted for it.

"So you burned her house down?"

"Yes, the fire was so much fun to watch."

"How and when did you set the fire?"

"The next night, I waited a little bit to see if she had seen me but the next day she looked at me funny when I came out of my house, so I knew she had. Mom keeps the matches up with the birthday candles."

"Didn't anyone ever tell you not to play around with matches?" An almost rhetorical question from Cho, curious to see how a little pyro might answer.

"I wasn't playing around, I knew what I was doing."

"Jeannie, why did you take Michael and not Christopher?" Van Pelt asked, and Jane leaned forward to hear the answer.

"If I killed Christopher then I wouldn't have anybody to play with."

"You mean you wouldn't have anyone to stick needles in at night," Cho clarified.

Jeannie appeared perplexed, the look of someone who realized she'd been misunderstood.

"But that _is_ how we play."

"Why do you stick needles in him?"

"I like the way it feels when they go in, like when you stick a knife in Play-Doh."

"But it hurts him, doesn't it?"

Jeannie shrugged.

"Your brother cries when you do it," Van Pelt pressed harder.

The little girl looked her dead in the face, small hand resting on a bald, eyeless doll head. "I like that too."

* * *

AN: Hope that was entertaining and not upsetting, we're nearly through now. I'm also fascinated to know that lots of right-handers actually wear their watch on their right hands, like Rigsby does. I'm a lefty myself, and I've always worn my watch on the right, it would be so distracting otherwise!


	8. Chapter 8

"_Your brother cries when you stick needles in him," Van Pelt pressed._

_The little girl looked her dead in the face, small hand resting on a bald, eyeless doll head. "I like that."_

* * *

A tap on the glass signaled that Lisbon had heard enough. It was as full and detailed a confession as they could possibly want, if a deeply unsettling one.

The agents collected themselves, Van Pelt sweeping the mutilated toys back into the box just ahead of the hand Jeannie reached out to caress one. Cho and the younger agent took their leave so that Lisbon could come formally charge her.

Last one out, Jane paused suddenly and turned back.

"Jeannie, did Michael cry when you took him?"

A small smile curved round the child's lips.

"He only cried later. When I made him bleed."

Jane, to his credit, gave the girl no sign that she had struck a nerve. Only the agents watching saw his soul flinch. Jane's daughter had died so young – unspoiled, unruined, but it would have come, in time, and here was this softly smiling child with the headband in her hair, precisely tied bows on her shoes, malice on her lips, to remind him that even had she lived, the little girl he'd cherished would have died eventually, in body or at heart.

Lisbon, who knew her moment when she saw it, slid in around Jane, one hand brushing his arm as she did so because they weren't a group much given to hugs or meaningful touches and instead had to draw comfort from those momentary contacts.

"Jeannie, we're going to be charging you with murdering Michael King and Mrs McMahon, and with setting fire to a house, do you understand?" Lisbon asked in a tone that clearly indicated that it was not up for debate.

Jeannie nodded, clouds gathering on her face.

"Because you're only seven, you're going to go home with your mother tonight, and she'll bring you to the police in the morning," she added. Unfortunately, because Jeannie was a minor, she was given twenty-four hours to surrender to the authorities. This was done so that the parents had time to obtain lawyers for their child, and to ensure the family had come to grips with the situation. Minors below a certain age were not typically considered a flight risk, and it was rare the child was not brought to the Statehouse within the required twenty-four. Of course, it was also rare a child was charged with anything more serious than possession of a little marijuana.

"But you can't send me to jail, I'm just a little kid," Jeannie argued.

"Yes. You are. And yes, we can," Jane, still suspended in the doorway, almost whispered.

Instantly the child erupted in rage. Lisbon merely pushed Jane gently out the door and shut it behind them, closing in Jeannie's wrath but not the sound of her animal yells.

Jeannie's mother, when she was summoned from the observation room, looked pale and drawn, not the openly agitated woman of a few days before. She seemed to sway a moment when Lisbon repeated to her that they were charging Jeannie, and Rigsby quickly maneuvered her into a chair, but she did not faint, did not fall.

Jane, who had perhaps deliberately not antagonized the little girl in front of her mother, was now in a position to offer attention, if not comfort.

"Would you like a glass of water, Mrs Washington?"

She shook her head mutely and allowed Van Pelt to take her son from her arms, arms tightening for a second before realizing the young woman was not a threat to what remained of her family. The others knew their strengths: Cho had already accomplished his aim and the others left Jane to what he did best, working the crowd. Lisbon, having summoned the marshals to supervise Jeannie, hovered in the background to explain in more exact terms what would now happen.

Mrs Washington looked up, finally and a little breathlessly, to meet Jane's calm eyes.

"I'm not a bad mother, Agent."

Jane smiled softly, didn't correct her.

"I don't let them watch too much television, I feed them organic food. On the weekends we go for bike rides or to museums – I've never left them alone, my husband and I have never spanked them, not even once. How could this happen? We go to church on Sundays! What made her this way, how could she do these things when we raised her like this?" There was shock, naturally, and confusion on her face, and the beginnings of self-blame.

"No one knows why some people commit murder without remorse, even as adults. One school does believe abuse or neglect can warp a child, but others suggest they are born this way," Jane explained gently. "I'm very sorry this happened to your family. It's always hard when a loved one makes choices we don't understand." Even if that choice was cold-blooded murder and that loved one was practically an infant.

Jane was working his usual charm on the mother not because he truly did sympathize with her, though he may have, but because it would ultimately get them what they wanted – Jeannie in custody. His reassurance was intended to emphasize that Mrs Washington and her family were the victims of random chance – bad luck, no one's fault.

But the truth was that though many people committed murder, many more did not. Even amongst sociopaths, this was true. Sociopaths lacked empathy, but that did not make them universally killers. They lived life as one from another planet; society's traditional morals and ethos presented as alien laws to them, and they were unable to relate to them on an emotional level. They could learn to play by these foreign rules, however, and to understand that this would make their lives easier even if they saw little reason for doing it, so that was the way most lived, lumbered with a code they did not see the need for but more or less adapted to.

Almost all creatures, human and otherwise, have the capacity to do serious harm. Amongst homo sapiens, at least, the vast majority never reached this potential, possibly because they lacked opportunity but more commonly because they lacked desire. It was when the impulse to harm overlapped a lack of internal morays preventing that act that the real damage was done, and just where that line was crossed was still a matter for debate. It could be in the womb, where a few neurotransmitters too many or too few changed brain chemistry subtly but irretrievably. It could be in childhood, where abuse or trauma made an indelible impression on a still-forming personality, or a lack of sufficient love and attention created a child who would never de-center. Perhaps a combination of all these, or none, some other reason entirely that no one had yet imagined.

All this was good science, but slender consolation to the mother who had conscientiously raised an apparently typical child for nearly a decade, only to discover her offspring had habits she had never taught, cravings she had never imagined, impulses she had never thought to teach against. Parents fear accident or abduction for their children – to be hit by a car riding their bicycle, or kidnapped from the bus stop before school. Later in life they fret about reckless driving, marijuana smoking, late-night drinking – seldom do they think to fear serious mental disturbance, to anticipate murder, arson, prison.

"Mrs Washington, because of Jeannie's age, we're required to release her to your care until the AAG formally files the charges. You'll have twenty-four hours to make arrangements for her defense and bring your daughter back to surrender herself." Lisbon interjected herself apologetically into the exchange.

Mrs Washington paled a little more at the idea of having to contact an attorney, the guardian ad litem, give interviews, all the myriad other details that had to be settled in order for the wheels of justice to roll forward. Or perhaps it was at the thought of bringing Jeannie back into her home knowing now what she had done.

"Can't I just give her to you now?" Wanting to make a quick break now, to spare herself the pain of fully processing what was happening.

The senior agent didn't quite a smile because that would have been out of place, but showed the woman enough warmth to reassure. "I understand this seems complicated, and it will be difficult for everyone, but we've found families cope better when they have a little time to process what's happened, explain things to the child, and make the necessary preparations."

Mrs Washington nodded jerkily, eyes focused anywhere but the dark-haired agent in front of her.

"Yes, yes, I don't know how we'll explain this to Christopher – my husband! He doesn't know yet! Oh, god…Jeannie is her father's princess, how will he ever believe she's done this?" _And will he think I'm responsible for it?_ Jane read the other fear in her eyes, to distract himself from thinking of fathers and their princesses.

"We'll also need to post agents near your home to minimize the risk of flight," Lisbon added apologetically. Couched as minimizing risk made it seem like being watched was for the family's own benefit, when really all it meant was that there was nowhere to run. Jane wasn't the only one who could turn a phrase.

"Flight, no! I mean yes? I mean, I understand. There's room a little ways up the street to park a car…?" Still trying to be helpful, old habits covering when higher reasoning failed.

"That should be fine, thank you very much."

"If you'd like we'll release Jeannie to you now, or would you like a few more minutes?" Jane asked.

This seemed to bring the woman back to the world, or the world back to her. "No, no it's better if I just take her home now. Christopher? Where's Chris?"

Van Pelt rose from her desk to return the boy to his mother. She had entertained him capably during the conversation, neither stiff nor saccharine. Rigsby, watching her, would normally have indulged in a fantasy or two about a child they could someday have together, but as rattled as he was saw only those glowing X-rays, and couldn't help but wonder what sort of person this handsome, active little boy would become in time, if pretty, well-groomed girls like Jeannie Washington became serial killers.

The banshee screams – anger, not sorrow – switched off abruptly in the interrogation room, and Jeannie was led out by a marshal, no tears on her cheeks and no remorse in her eyes.

"Mommy!" She ran to her mother, who looked critically and justifiably torn about embracing her.

"They had me in this little room, Mom, and they took my toys!"

"Jeannie, you hurt those people," Mrs Washington looked seriously at her daughter as if seeing her for the first time.

"But they made me," she back away a little, repeated her earlier assertion in the same quizzical tone, genuinely believing she had acted in the only logical way given the options available to her.

"Jeannie, you're in very real trouble, do you understand?"

"But they said I could go home with you. Please take me home, Mommy, they can't put kids in jail." This said in a tone of such absolute earnestness it chilled every agent present to the spine.

"We're going to talk about this on the way home, alright sweetheart? You've got your jacket? Alright, agents, we're…going to go…I'll bring – I'll come back like we discussed." She had been going to admit to bringing the girl back, but thought better of it and no one blamed her.

As soon as the elevator dinged shut behind the Washingtons Lisbon jerked her head at the nearby marshal and he headed out to the motor pool to follow them home. No sense in watching the house all night if they drove straight from the Statehouse to the airport.

"Notice how she attempted to re-ingratiate herself to her mother, asking to go home, calling her 'Mommy' like a younger child, when she used 'Mom' in talking with us?" Jane noted pedantically.

"She's learning how to manipulate," Cho observed.

"Clumsily, but she's young yet. In time, in time. So who's first on stakeout?" He grinned as the other agents made for another round of Rochambeau.

Hours later, Rigsby and Cho having drawn the midwatch, much to the chagrin of both, but for different reasons, settled in for a dull evening. Rigsby would have rather have had an opportunity to spend time with Van Pelt; Cho would rather have had an opportunity to spend time in his bed. And, despite the apparent ease of escape, flight was not a common enough occurrence in such situations to improve prospects of excitement that night.

Cho cracked his book and Rigsby tilted his seat back – already pretty far from the steering wheel, considering the man was six-foot-four. They had a standing rule that anyone using the government vehicle had to return the seat to a midpoint position, because the two agents on either end of the height spectrum rendered it impossible for anyone else to use.

"Snack?" Rigsby proffered a bag of potato chips. The man might be a bottomless pit, but he did bring the best stakeout food. Van Pelt complained about crumbs in the vehicle, but she probably only wore her "Monday" underwear on Mondays, too.

"No thanks."

Rigsby knew better than to be offended by his fellow agent's abrupt answers, and shrugged.

"Got cookies too if you get tired of that book," he added in a tone of voice that indicated he thought the book a bigger waste of time than the stakeout.

"What kind of cookies?"

Rigsby, mouth full, held up the package, something with a Nabisco label. Cho had read somewhere that Phillip Morris, the tobacco company, owned Nabisco. It just didn't seem quite right that the same people were responsible for making both cigarettes and Oreos. The symbols of classic childhood and of hacking death, under one roof. Good job security, though, at least in the United States, there a nation of oral fixations worshipped at the twin altars of junk food and cancer sticks.

He watched Rigsby pop a potato chip in his mouth.

"No thanks."

Lights went on and off at intervals in the Washington home, first on the ground floor as they ate dinner and then upstairs as children were put to bed. The shadowy outline of Mr Washington could be seen making one last tour of the downstairs, checking to be sure doors were locked and windows shut, and then the household appeared to settle down for the night.

"Wonder how the parents are gonna cope after they bring the daughter in tomorrow," Cho remarked idly over his book. He wasn't a small-talk guy, but there was only so much time one could sit in a metal box with another person without feeling compelled to speak to them.

"Dunno," Rigsby replied. "Must be hard, though, knowing she hurt their little boy too. Love their daughter but have to protect their son, like you have to choose between your kids, I dunno how you'd do it. It's like when King Solomon said to cut the baby in half."

Something about the way he said it made Cho tense, pages sliding past his fingers.

"She wouldn't choose, could she?"

"The mom?"

"No mother could choose between her children."

"That's sad, but what're we supposed to do for her?" Rigsby, for once, took the hard line, because he was a literal and practical man, and this was the literal and practical truth.

"In that movie the Bad Seed, the mother finds out her daughter's been killing people but even then she can't just let the police take her away. She poisons the kid and shoots herself in the head." They had both lived, too, at least until the girl was struck by lightning in a storm, but those details were irrelevant to Cho's point.

"She was in a pretty big hurry to get Jeannie home," Rigsby mused.

"_Shit_," they spoke as one and jumped from the vehicle.

* * *

AN: This chapter is for Ebony10 who is my frequent-flyer reviewer. :) Thank-you to everyone else as well, especially the others who have given me routine feedback. One more long chapter left on my marathon fic!


	9. Chapter 9

AN: And now, my friends, we come to the end of our tale. Thank you all for keeping up with it, I am well pleased to see it was such a success. This has been my longest story in some time, including the ones I make a living from, and all the responses definitely made it worth the effort. I will endeavour to give you all another as soon as the muse sings to me. A long chapter for my grand finale; as always, enjoy.

_

* * *

"In that movie the Bad Seed, the mother finds out her daughter's been killing people but even then she can't just let the police take her away. She poisons the kid and shoots herself in the head."_

_"She _was_ in a pretty big hurry to get Jeannie home," Rigsby mused._

_"_Shit_," they spoke as one and jumped form the vehicle._

* * *

They found Jeannie in bed, skin still flushed from the bath, brown hair brushed and clinging damply to her neck. Dressed in matching pyjamas and pliable like a sleeping child, when they rolled her over, giving the illusion of life, but she was not sleeping – not sleeping, for her last breath had been of water, not air, and she was already far too long dead for there to be the remotest chance of restarting her heart, much less saving her brain.

Mrs Washington, weeping softly in the doorway because her baby was dead but not because of the consequences for herself.

"They would have locked her up, if they couldn't help her she'd kill more people, or they'd shut her away forever. I couldn't let her keep hurting people but I couldn't let anyone hurt her."

Rational, after a fashion, and ironically the sort of sense Jeannie herself had applied when faced with limited resources. Jeannie had killed out of pleasure, however, and her mother out of love; curious how opposite ends of the spectrum had somehow arrived at the same place.

Cho cuffed her, tersely recited the Miranda warning, no sign, as ever, in his face, that he felt regret at a child's death or horror at her murder or even sympathy for the one who committed it. Perhaps he did feel nothing; perhaps years from now he would be one of the ones that crumbled because he had locked away too much for too long. Rigsby restrained the husband for a moment until he too sobbed into the bigger man's shoulder and then held him awkwardly til he had composed himself. Handed him the necessary information, led him away until the paramedics had zipped the deceptively angelic face away behind industrial black plastic and carried the girl's body off into their ambulance, started off down the street without lights or sirens because there was no need at all to hurry.

A long, quiet ride back to the CBI, punctuated by whispery crying from the back, where Mrs Washington was approaching the point of over-emotion and over-exhaustion. The customary booking, consigning to lock-up, a few more forms added to the stack they'd have to complete later, and then the slow realization that there was actually nothing left to do.

They would've liked to go to some cop bar, Irish of course, not some sports bar with goateed yuppies, and drink til their eyes slid out of their heads. They could have, too; more than one congealing liver in the CBI could be attributed to just such a ritual. Occasionally they did go play pool somewhere, nursed a warm beer, played a few rounds of cards, but that was for companionship, not for forgetting.

The thing was, there just never seemed to be much point, because perhaps fortunately the chemistry was all wrong for getting stupid together.

Cho drunk was not noticeably different than Cho sober, except for the infamous Asian glow; more than a single beer and all visible skin flushed the most surprising shade of pink. Once Jane had asked him if _all_ his skin turned that color. If it had been a woman asking, he'd have offered to show her, but it was just Jane and all that earned was that thousand-mile stare he'd perfected in Sarajevo or Mogadishu or Kabul, because he'd admitted to military service and his preference for short-sleeved shirts pointed to a grunt or a jarhead, and you didn't get flat eyes like that sitting in a desk at West Point.

Rigsby was a big guy, could hold his alcohol when the situation called for it, was a good drinking buddy because his size and solidity pretty much assured no local lushes would hassle the ladies. He'd rather eat beernuts and swap sea stories, though, because he was honestly interested in the things other people had to say, and knew all the right places to nod seriously or laugh appreciatively.

Van Pelt wasn't a drinker, never had been, and now that she was an adult, didn't have any place in her life where she could slot in a brand new habit just like that.

A beautiful girl, Grace Van Pelt, and comfortable with her looks but disgusted by the attention they sometimes garnered. A man should have some way to interact with a woman, to show her attention or even attraction, other than trying to get in her pants. As if this were some great compliment. Not that she didn't know good men – Cho was funny and smart, and Rigsby, well, he was decent if anyone was. Good kisser too. Jane was certainly nice, and she enjoyed his sometimes elaborate chivalry.

Easy enough on the eyes, all three, but despite vague possibilities with Rigsby they were still all colleagues. These were men who had had to get where they were by working hard and measuring up, at least two of them. The men who bothered her were all the others, the ones who only knew how to talk to her breasts or her ass and not her mind or heart. Van Pelt, had she ever learned how to drink, would have spent a lot of time crying in her cups as her last illusions came away.

Lisbon drank, sometimes, though no one would have questioned her if she didn't; they knew too well what she came from. But it was unprofessional, not to mention undignified, to let her team see her compromised, so she'd have one for appearances, listen to the rest of them talk til she was safe to drive, and take her leave.

She liked them, truly, all of them, but for her safety and theirs a little distance must be maintained. Let them get too familiar with her, and they'd feel comfortable questioning her. Question her in the office, and nothing very much would happen, but question her in the field and someone could die – one of _them_ could die – and so she kept the lines drawn neatly in the sand, let the wind smudge them occasionally but never wipe them away altogether.

And of course there was Jane, a man with a reason to drink if anyone had one, but if he did it was in his sombre haunted house, not here where he was far too distracted by the million or so unguarded secrets that buzzed unattended in such places to ever get properly drunk. He did play cards, and Cho would soon be a worthy adversary for him, but why should he waste his time with alcohol when the naked human psyche was there all around for the probing? Besides, he did mostly as he pleased sober, so there weren't many inhibitions left to lower.

Then, too, there was the uneven gender ratio. Two women and three men would have always left someone sleeping alone, so maudlin, incestuous one-night stands were out of the question. Rigsby and Cho occasionally ended up on one another's sofa, but that was a far cry from fleeing a friend's bed still smelling of sex and bad choices. They all knew already who would end up doing that with whom in the coming years, unacknowledged except in fleeting sideways glances in quiet moments, but out of respect to the one who would be left alone at the end of it all they maintained the status quo a little longer.

No, all told it took a certain lack of imagination to drown the memories of bad cases in beer bottles or shot glasses, and they were none of them without imagination. It was a good thing, too.

Tonight would have been one for the books, because Rigby's faith in human goodness had been rocked, Van Pelt's naïveté had been body checked into the boards, and Cho, who had seen violent youth and vicious crime and sometimes both in the same place, couldn't shake the vision of that little girl's own remorseless eyes and brittle voice. Lisbon had a headache like her skull was shrinking, because there was going to be a zoo when the media got their teeth into this, and it was going to look bad no matter who spun it or how, and there was something physically painful about the broken mother left sobbing in the jail cell because they all of them understood a little bit what it meant to love someone so much that you would protect them even if it meant never seeing, holding, loving them again.

Painful also that it was better this way, they knew, though others would never understand, for if the girl had had her day in court she'd be sent to a juvenile facility and be out by twenty-one, or to a psych ward where her chameleon properties would get her released before puberty, and then it was out into the world again with all that calculating malice and better ideas for what to do with it.

Nothing much to celebrate, but still they ate pizza, toasted the end of the case with soft drinks that fizzed much-needed caffeine into their blood, cracked a few jokes at one anothers' expense and Jane did a few parlor tricks. Van Pelt took out her braid and Cho took off his tie and Rigsby rolled up his sleeves. Jane discarded his jacket and leaned into his couch like it was absorbing him. The boys sat backwards in their chairs and the girls sat on desks and even Lisbon and Cho were heard to laugh.

They had seen enough by now to damage them but not to cripple yet, not like detectives who worked sex crimes or crime technicians who had to scrub brains off walls. They had family members, friends they would tell this story to over and over until it ceased to haunt, and in the coming years these would evaporate steadily until all they had was one another and the four walls around them. It would get to them eventually, if they stayed with Serious Crimes long enough, but so far pizza and cola and lousy civil servants' pay was good enough to get them through the night.

Paperwork came next, of course, the bane of bureaucracy and any civilized nation. Given the choice, most would prefer to be shot rather than spend their night hunched over a keyboard and godammit if Jane didn't get himself nearly blown to hell every other week, which meant all kinds of extra forms to fill out.

The others finished their reports and trouped out one by one – Van Pelt's thoroughly and concisely written, though she spun it out longer than necessary so she managed to walk out within a few minutes of Rigsby; Jane guessed he'd catch her before she reached her car.

Cho's would be concise too, written like he talked, simple sentences, official terms used where appropriate and incident report accurate to the second. Not as interesting as Van Pelt's, whose reports always read with emotion, but clear and by the book. As with the man himself, if you didn't look closely, you'd never know he broke as many rules as Jane.

Rigsby ploughed though his forms with grim determination, the same look on his face when he finished as a student finishing his final exams. He always dumped it all straight on Lisbon's desk, triumphantly, no editing or proofreading for him, and hurried to make the elevator before Van Pelt left the building.

Consolidating said forms and reports was left to the lead agent, to collate them properly and assign a sort of order to what would otherwise be hopelessly disorderly. Lisbon didn't mind; it was her own closure on a case, to be able to streamline, summarize, sort chronologically and seal it all in an envelope – finally no longer her problem.

Late that night, in the hazy darkness of the office, Jane appeared in her doorway. She looked up expectantly, prepared to be vaguely amused or slightly chagrined by whatever she was about to hear.

"She didn't look anything like my daughter, you know."

Whatever she had expected, it wasn't that. His voice was soft, the same tone he'd used the day he'd told her _it was a locked room_.

She didn't reply, afraid of saying something too senstive or not enough. He saw as much in her face and elaborated.

"You've worried about me this whole case. You're worried every little girl reminds me of her. But she didn't look like my daughter at all."

He hadn't denied that seeing a little girl reminded him of the one he lost, however; Lisbon had worked with Jane long enough to notice lies of omission like that.

"Just making sure you're okay, Jane. That's my job."

A faint smile creased the edges of his eyes. "You're good at your job."

Taken aback now by his words, half simple observation, half frank compliment, the admission he knew she was trying to look out for him, and he let her.

She smiled back at him, not the mock-frustrated one she wore so frequently but a smaller warmer one, for him to take back to the sofa and use to keep off the worst of the chill of memories tonight.

Satisfied, Jane turned, then paused, hand on the doorframe.

"She had blonde hair."

"Your…?" Lisbon hesitated to say the word aloud.

"My daughter. Blonde hair. Like mine." He moved the hand vaguely to his own head, seemed surprised when the fingers touched his hair; as if, indeed, surprised to realize his hair was any color at all.

Curly too, like his daughter's had been, and once he'd kept it highlighted and gelled for the cameras, but it was a long time now since he'd bothered with personal maintenance like that. He was a tidy man, neatly dressed and well-groomed, because that's what one did, after all, but he rarely looked in the mirror, seldom bothered with things like brushing his hair or matching his socks to his shirt.

He did still get his hair cut, because people said the most interesting things to their hairdressers and he liked to eavesdrop, but when his world had been so violently realigned those years before so many things, like shoes and ties, pointless wrappings for earthly forms, manners and rules, had fallen away. Hair and eye color weren't part of his mental inventory of himself any longer and it had been a long time since he'd thought a thing like what he'd just told Lisbon.

_She had hair like this. _That was a thing the parent of a living child thought – _she looks like me_.

Lisbon was looking at him in some concern and he exerted a considerable effort to wipe any trace of his thoughts from his face and bearing, bowed a little and waved to cover that his fingers shook.

"Have a good night, then."

And took himself off to the sofa.

* * *

As Mr Washington sobbed hoarsely into his wife's pillow, Christopher waited for his sister to come play as she did every night once their parents turned out the lights. Whenever they forgot to turn on the nightlights, Christopher cried until they remembered, because otherwise it was too dark to find his toys. Tonight, his father had remembered, although his mother had not come to kiss him goodnight. Jeannie didn't come either, and he was bored and irritated. _She_ never forgot, but he was not yet two, and his patience was not unlimited.

Usually Jeannie got the toys, but tonight she apparently didn't want to play. It was a good game, too; she had taught him. Christopher climbed carefully over the bars of his crib, only just tall enough to reach. Someone had taken their toys from under the dresser, but he had more just in case. The wheel was very delicate for small hands to spin, but he managed. Jeannie didn't often let him do it, but sometimes he was allowed.

He wondered for a moment if they would watch a fire again the way they had the other night, already just at the border of his young memory, leaping orange and yellow and he and Jeannie giggling at his window because it was so beautiful.

By the light of the weak nightlight bulbs he shook out a scattering of silver needles onto the floor and picked the best one. He looked carefully at his leg, tried to remember with his little boy's brain where they had put the last ones. Found the spot he wanted, slid in the needle until it disappeared under one fat finger, and smiled.

It was such a good game.

* * *

FIN.


End file.
